April 2019 Lunchtime Abstracts & Details

How Objective Can Science Be?
Peter Urbach, London School of Economics
Professor Emeritus, Dept of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
12:05 pm
1117 Cathedral of Learning

Abstract: TBA

The Hype, the Hope, and the Science Behind Precision Oncology
Anya Plutynski, Visiting Professor in HPS
Washington University in St. Louis
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
12:05 pm, 1117 Cathedral of Learning

In 2015, President Obama launched his “Precision Medicine Initiative,” an ambitious effort at funding research that would ensure that patients receive care “tailored to them.” One “short-term goal” of the program was – effectively – to provide continued funding to research in cancer genomics. The Cancer Genome Atlas Project was launched in 2005, and was (perhaps not coincidentally) just wrapping up in 2015-2016. In this talk, I will consider the promises made on behalf of TCGA, and the reality.
The the first 5 years of the project was largely a pilot project – one that created a vast multi-institutional infrastructure of university hospitals, in relationship with private biotech, and an array of specialists working in a new kind of “big data” research. Big data research of this type faces particular types of methodological challenges. I will consider one particular challenge - a variant of the “curse of dimensionality” - how it arose during TCGA, and in what sense it was resolved. I will then consider how we ought to define and measure success in scientific contexts like this one, and associated challenges facing honest advertising for biomedical research. False hope is impossible to avoid altogether. However, many oft trumpeted successes of precision oncology were developed and approved (in some cases) decades before the launch of cancer genomics, suggesting that TCGA had less impact than is often advertised. Nonetheless, I will argue that TCGA has succeeded; however, “success” in this context is rather different from how it is typically understood in philosophy of science. Sequencing is cheaper, analysis of cancer genomics is more sophisticated, and there is a much wider appreciation of both the heterogeneity of cancer genomes, and the complexity of cancer causation than prior to 2005. If anything, TCGA has complicated and challenged many of the initial presuppositions behind how cancer genomics would or could inform precision oncology.

Cognition Does Not Affect Perception
Chaz Firestone
Department of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University
Tuesday, April 23, 2019
12:05 pm, 1117 Cathedral of Learning

Abstract: What determines what we see? A tidal wave of recent research alleges that visual experience is 'penetrated' by higher-level cognitive states such as beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions, and linguistic abilities. There is a growing consensus that such effects are ubiquitous, and even that the distinction between seeing and thinking may itself be unsustainable. I argue otherwise: There is in fact no compelling evidence for such top-down effects of cognition on perception, or “cognitive penetrability”. I will present several case studies of empirically anchored 'pitfalls' that recast such evidence, in each case showing how alleged top-down effects on perception not only can be explained by alternative factors, but in fact are explained by such factors. The discovery of substantive top-down effects of cognition on perception remains a revolutionary possibility for our understanding of how the mind is organized; but without addressing these pitfalls, no empirical report will license such exciting conclusions.